Energies of Attraction And Connection

Two experts discuss Catholic teaching about sexuality, celibacy, and sin, saying "the issue will make or break" the Church.

Heagle: The message I got in the seminary was that if you are going to be spiritual you can't be sexual. One cancels out the other. Or, to the extent you are sexless, to that extent you are holy. But every person is called to be a lover and life-giver.

Ferder: If we don't take our sexual energy seriously, it catches us off guard, blindsides us, pops up in unexpected ways.

We co-teach a Christian sexuality course at Seattle University to graduate students, prefacing the class by saying there are no stupid questions, that everyone's experience matters. No one's experience is normative for everyone else, but everyone's experience must be respected. We try to create a safe environment. One of our dreams and hopes is that small Christian communities and Catholic parishes could be places where it's safe enough that people can bring their sexual questions, their concerns, failures, disagreements or agreements with church teachings, their convictions, and know that there is a welcome space there where it can all be explored.

NCR: In your book you label sexual sin as violation of persons. Are these kinds of sins primarily relationship problems?

Heagle: Catholic moral teaching pointed out sexual sin is illicit pleasure. That suspicion of pleasure goes back to St. Augustine, who felt that all pleasure is disordered. We know now that pleasure is a built-in bodily response that is part of our physiological makeup, put there by evolution for the continuation of the species. There is nothing disordered about it. It's the relational context of human sexuality that creates the ethical demand, not our human nature. When sexual relationships become abusive, dishonest or exploitative, the bonds of mutuality and respect are broken. Adultery and abusive relationships are no longer life enhancing and life giving.

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Ferder: Our tradition often uses the two terms chastity and celibacy interchangeably, equating the two. It shows up in teen chastity programs. We usually don't teach teens to be reverent toward themselves and one another in their relationships. Rather we tell them to just say no right at the time when their sexual urgency is at its peak. Chastity, we think, has less to do with what we do or don't do with our genitals but what we do with our hearts. It has to do with how we treat people in relationships, how much reverence we show ourselves and others. I can be chaste while sexually active or celibate. All of us are called to chastity, to treat one another with dignity, respect and truth, That's the ultimate meaning of chastity. It's sustainable sexuality.